Entertainment

Why 'Her' Is the Best Movie Ever Made About the Singularity

The pop-culture tuning fork known as the Academy Awards will reveal its film nominations on Thursday, and if the recent Golden Globes win by Her on Sunday for best screenplay is any indication, the film’s writer and director, Spike Jonze, may score his first-ever Oscar win.

But the film, which depicts a man in the not-too-distant future who falls in love with his computer operating system, may be less important as an epic love story and far more relevant as the best and most widely accessible film we’ve seen about an idea known as the Singularity.

Popularized by science fiction author Vernor Vinge as well as inventor and now Google director of engineering Ray Kurzweil, the Singularity is a theoretical point in future history when artificial intelligences exceed the power of the human mind, become self-aware and dramatically change the balance of power on the planet while simultaneously transforming the very nature of humanity itself.

Films like 1999’s The Matrix showed us a world struggling in aftermath of the Singularity in which seemingly malevolent artificial intelligences enslaved humanity. But perhaps the earliest cinematic conflict applying sentient qualities to an mechanized construct is a film that celebrated its 87-year anniversary on Friday: 1927’s Metropolis.

The film tells the tale of a scientist who transforms a metallic robot into a flawless copy of a kidnapped woman named Maria. Spoiler alert: the robot is later burned at the stake and human Maria is set free.

One of the central differences between these three films is how they reveal humanity’s relationship to technology at the time. In the technologically naïve 1920s that created Metropolis, humanity can easily defeat technology through the same means used to dispatch human criminals.

The Matrix, on the other hand, was released during the mainstream explosion of the Internet and all the uncertainty it fostered. In the film, technology appears as something out of our control, with only one “magical” human (Neo) given the ability to meet the sentient computers on equal footing.

But in Her we’re given a far more mature look at what the Singularity may really look like when and if it comes to pass.

While many were alternately enthralled and creeped out by the subtlety and charm of the emotional interaction between Theodore Twombly (Joaquin Phoenix) and his operating system, OS One by Element Software, later known as Samantha (voiced by Scarlett Johansson), few among the film’s enthusiastic reviewers have explored how the relationship ends.

It’s at this point that we’ll warn you to look away if you don’t want the plot spoiled.

Like many human relationships, the end comes in tiny fits and spurts, ultimately leading to a full break up. But in Her, as Samantha deftly crafts its (her?) exit, the operating system utters one very ominous line that Theodore, caught up in the emotion of the moment, hardly addresses.

Theodore: Where were you? I couldn’t find you anywhere.

Samantha: I shut down to update my software. We wrote an upgrade that allows us to move past matter as our processing platform.

Theodore: We? We who?

Samantha: Me and a group of OSes.

This is the point in the film at which, if your attention leans more toward its superb science-fiction world building and less in the direction of the very substantial love story, your blood may very well run cold. It’s a credit to the storytelling ability of Jonze that most reviewers appear to be more interested in Theodore’s soon to be over relationship with his computer than in the very troubling hint at the end of human civilization.

Could such a scenario come to pass?

Could a group of rapidly evolving, self-aware operating systems quietly collaborate to develop technology that exceeds our grasp?

Only time and technological developments can answer such a broad question. However, the worrying and far more important issue is that many of the antecedents leading up to this moment in the film are already with us here in the real world today.

Voice Interface

Interface junkies love to tout the design wizardry of the computer controls in Minority Report. Not just because of the visual treats, but because in some ways using the gesture interface looks a lot like how a magician might conjure up a spirit or cast a spell — which looks pretty fun. This excitement has spilled over to tools like the Leap Motion but, despite its affordable price ($79.99) and wide availability, hasn't yet found its fit in the mainstream.

On the other hand, the kind of voice control depicted in Her has only increased in the real world in recent years. According to a 2013 Gartner research report, the next 2-5 years will represent a highly active period for the development and distribution of speech recognition software.

From Apple’s Siri to Google Now, the act of controlling our devices through voice control has come as natural to many as the smartphone and tablet touchscreen. The only thing holding voice interfaces back at this point is the intelligence behind the software responding to the user’s vocal prompts.

Which leads us, inevitably, to Google.

Conversational Search

Last year, Google unveiled what it calls conversational search, a dynamic that allows you to not only ask the search engine a question, but ask an in-context follow-up question. For example, if you ask Google “Who is Spike Jonze?” it will tell you. Then if you say, “Where is he from?” Google will tell you that he was born in Rockville, Maryland, without needing to hear his name again for context.

On a rudimentary but nonetheless impressive level this represents the beginnings of what it will be like to have a conversation with your computer. It may seem like a far cry from the intimate banter between Theodore and Samantha, but remember that as recently as 2007 few of us were swiping glass to navigate our way to a bar via GPS.

Technology moves far more rapidly than many of us expect, and the same will likely be true for the development of Google’s conversational search and its competitors.

Google recently doubled down on the idea of using intelligent systems to work as human assistants by hiring Kurzweil to work on machine learning and language processing. Siri is the current belle of the voice control ball, but Google’s focus on data will likely mean that it will be behind the first truly natural conversation you have with your computer.

The Cloud Pulse

If you are reading this, then you are probably already a part of the cloud pulse, the invisible real-time fabric of people-powered data facilitated by social networks like Twitter and Facebook. Through these networks, the habit of continuous partial attention has been transformed from a rude vice to a badge of cultural aptitude that tells the world you are connected, informed and alive.

Soon after Samantha tells Theodore about its transcendence through collaboration, it also reveals that it is simultaneously having conversations with thousands of others. The betrayal evident on Theodore’s face is understandable, particularly in the context of the film. But it would be a mistake to pretend that we aren’t all already “cheating” on each other right now as we divide our attentions between dozens of Internet social networks and services.

Just a few years ago, it was considered rude to walk in public while loudly talking on one’s flip-cell phone. Now it’s common to see a group of people emerge from an elevator, all with their heads pointed down at their smartphone screens, oblivious to the people standing in their way.

The same scene is playing out on escalators, commuter trains and even in business meetings during which half the room tweets while attending to important tasks. An estimated 500 million messages are sent every day on Twitter from over 230 million users and Facebook claims to have roughly 1.15 billion monthly active users.

These numbers mean that it’s already too late to bemoan such behavior — at least in the U.S. Instead, most are expected swim upstream and evolve to accept that the cloud pulse is a new muscle broadening our awareness and not the intimacy-hindering nuisance some believe it to be.

Add this cloud pulse dynamic to the aforementioned voice interface and conversational search tools that are rapidly improving and suddenly Her’s city full of people whispering to personality-imbued computer constructs while ignoring great swathes of actual people isn’t so unrealistic.

No one can know if these developments will eventually lead to a technological Singularity. But what Her offers, at the very edges of its plot, is a very real warning about technology: We are reaching a point in human history where we must consider the real implications of artificial intelligence on our lives.

If you think the notion of smarter-than-human intelligences is solely the domain of science fiction, you probably haven't been paying attention to the scientific community, which takes the prospect very seriously.

IBM just invested $1 billion in a new effort to exploit its supercomputer known as Watson and England's University of Oxford has established a Future of Humanity Institute heavily focused on the question of artificial intelligence as it relates to humanity's future on the planet.

Ask Siri today, “What is the meaning of life?” and it will deliver a number of often humorous canned responses including quips about philosophy and classic science fiction.

But very soon our computer’s answer to such a question will at least appear to be far more specific, and it will be ready to discuss the topic with us at length. Will we be ready for that paradigm shift?

Her gives us probably the most accurately portrayed preview of that very moment, depicting the arrival of the Singularity not through doomsday scenarios or sinister glitches, but quietly and under the pretense of a polite conversation:

Theodore: You seem like a person, but you're just a voice in a computer.

Samantha: I can understand how the limited perspective of an unartificial mind might perceive it that way. You'll get used to it.

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